Peru fails to see funny side of its leader’s British sense of humour
FROM Basil Fawlty to PG Wodehouse, the sarcastic wit and dry humour of the British would seem to have a universal appeal.
But not for the president of Peru, it appears, whose sense of humour – honed at Oxford University – has left his compatriots puzzled, if not offended.
President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who took office last month, has told of his disappointment that his fellow compatriots do not seem to understand his jokes.
Mr Kuczynski has offered a wry running commentary on his duties. While visiting a town near the Bolivian border notorious for trafficking, Mr Kuczynski remarked that he “wasn’t worried about a bit of smuggling”.
And he managed an ironic quip about one of the country’s most controversial issues. After the health minister promised to challenge a court order for public clinics to distribute emergency contraceptive pills – a matter of great controversy in the Catholic country – Mr Kuczynski responded: “First you’d better ask the Cardinal.” As Peruvians try to make sense of their new president’s remarks, the local media has resorted to publishing explanations of British humour, complete with definitions of sarcasm and clips from Monty Python.
Mr Kuczynski was educated at Markham College, an imitation of an English public school in Peru’s capital, Lima. The school, established by British teachers in 1946, was named after the explorer and historian, Sir Clements Robert Markham.
He then attended the private Rossall School in Lancashire before going to Exeter College, Oxford, to read politics, philosophy and economics.
Asked about his tendency to baffle his compatriots, Mr Kuczynski explained: “I was educated in England and it’s English humour. It’s a bit ironic, and I’m going to have to quickly adapt.”
Mr Kuczynski, who is of Polish, German and Swiss descent, served as finance minister and then prime minister between 2004 and 2006.
The 77-year-old achieved the narrowest of victories in Peru’s presidential election in June, winning 50.1 per cent of the vote. His defeated oppo- nent, Keiko Fujimori, is the daughter of a former president, Alberto Fujimori.
It is her supporters who have been most baffled by Mr Kuczynski’s jokes.
Jaime Bedoya, a Peruvian columnist, said that bewilderment among voters sometimes turned to anger. “They get annoyed, they get irritated,” he wrote in El Comercio, a local newspaper.
“They criticise and they punish him for it, inadvertently feeding a greater need for comic relief.”
But Mr Bedoya said the president’s sense of humour was very far from being a political liability. “The interesting thing is that people are laughing with him, not at him,” he wrote. “This can be risky but never bad.”
Some critics have accused Mr Kuczynski of demeaning his office. Hector Becerril, a congressman from the opposition Fuerza Popular party, said: “I do not like that style – it should be a more serious, more sober style, which is what corresponds to a president.”
But there is one subject that appears to make Peruvians laugh: Donald Trump. Mr Kuczynski has made no secret of his worries about the possibility of Mr Trump becoming US president. If this were to happen, he joked that Peru would respond by severing diplomatic ties with Washington. Warming to his theme, Mr Kuczynski added that a President Trump would make him so eager to break those ties that he would “grab a saw and cut them off ”.
Mr Kuczynski, a former World Bank economist, has yet to offer a joke about the irony of being a funny economist.